


Presumed Alive

by aralias



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Gen, Post Gauda Prime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-21
Updated: 2016-12-21
Packaged: 2018-09-10 21:17:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8939692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aralias/pseuds/aralias
Summary: Gauda Prime and what happened afterwards.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [la_Avispa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/la_Avispa/gifts).



Back on the Liberator, Avon used to say that I was useless, an idiot. Or at least, he did when he was in a bad mood. When he was in a better mood he used to say I was only good for three things – sleeping, drinking and opening locks – and that he didn’t have much use for the first two, and only limited use for the third. Nice man, Avon.

Actually, come to think of it, I don’t think he ever _did_ say that thing about the three talents, but it’s the sort of thing he would have said, if he’d thought of it. And if he had said it, I might have said that _he_ didn’t have much use for them, but he wasn’t the one who had to live with them. To live _by_ them.

I’ve always made my living from other people’s property. Do what you’re best at – that’s what my mum always said, although I think she probably hoped I’d turn out to be best at being the president of the galaxy, or the best fighter pilot in the alpha quadrant, rather than a brilliant cracksman. But you can’t have everything – she used to say that too. Your pockets are never big enough for a start, even the specially made ones.

The ability to sleep anywhere can’t be overrated when you’re on the run. I mean it – you have to grab whatever sleep you can, when you can, because you may never get that ‘assigned rest period’ they keep promising you. In fact, you generally don’t. And a thief like me needs to keep his reactions sharp. I’m surprised, actually, that Avon didn’t appreciate the ability more – he wasn’t very good at sleeping, even in his assigned rest period, and it did wonders for his temper. Made it worse than usual, I mean.

As for drinking – well, again, you’re on the run, aren’t you? A man has to have a few pleasures, doesn’t he? Given the things I’ve seen, I’d rather like to have a few more.

One of the worst things I’ve seen was –

No, hang on a minute: let me tell it another way. That wasn’t a very good beginning.

I’m one of the best there is at lying down somewhere with my eyes closed. That’s not boasting – No, somehow I didn’t think you thought it was.

I’ve honed my ability to block out the world completely with continual practice over a long and eventful lifespan. If you want someone to sleep on the job, I’m your man.

But it was difficult, even for me, to lie there on the floor of Blake’s base with the others lying around me. You’ve heard about that, haven’t you? Gauda Prime, Avon’s misunderstanding, and then all those troopers? What’s that? Oh - you have? All right, all right, I know you have – it’s everywhere, isn’t it? But that’s a later part of the story.

This part is about me lying there, _pretending_ to be dead, while around me all my friends … weren’t.

That’s why I have to tell the story this way – make it funny, make it about me. Until I’ve had a few more drinks, anyway, and can face it properly. It’s bad enough that I was there, without having to relive it properly. You understand, don’t you?

Well. I lay still, pretending to be dead, for well over an hour. Two hours maybe. One of the troopers rolled me over onto my back to see if I moved, and I lay there still and quiet until he walked away.

Once his footsteps had gone I flicked my eyes over to Avon to check if he was pretending too, but you already know he wasn’t. Blake, half covered by Avon’s body, wasn’t pretending either, and behind those two I could see lovely Dayna who’d been shot while I’d been trying to distract Blake’s bodyguard, and pretty Soolin. Neither of them were going to get up again either. Tarrant I couldn’t see, and I must say that was a relief. Now, I know that’s the sort of thing that _I_ might have said on the Liberator – but this time it wasn’t because I didn’t want to talk to Tarrant. I just didn’t want to know he was dead. He was, though, of course. They all were.

None of them had done what I’d done – dropped at the first sound of gunfire, and stayed down. They were all fighters, you see. Different set of skills, and one that Avon generally found more useful. Not that it was much use to any of them on that occasion. Or ever would be again.

But I’m getting maudlin again, and I said I wouldn’t.

After those two hours I told you about, I use another of _my_ talents – one not even on Avon’s list. I ran. Running away is another very underrated survival technique, but again it’s been very useful to me. The troopers thought we were all dead so they weren’t even guarding the flyer we’d come in on. I relieved them of it without very much trouble, calling Orac on the teleport bracelet they hadn’t even taken off me (shoddy work, even assuming I had been a corpse), and getting him to open the doors to the silo.

Bit of a noisy exit, I grant you, but once I picked up Orac he helped me fake an explosion (even noisier). Everyone thought I was dead again, and gave up searching. You just can’t get the staff these days, can you?

To be fair, they probably thought they had better things to do than look for a dead man – like searching for Orac, who had left a few fake distress calls around the place. Come to think of it, yes – that probably is why they didn’t come after me. Orac isn’t a fighter either, but like me he’s not entirely useless.

Avalon didn’t seem to think so anyway. In fact, she seemed downright glad when the two of us showed up on her secret base a few months later … although she was a bit surprised we’d managed to find it without asking her. It took a bit of work to convince her not to just shoot us down, but I managed that too. Something else Avon could have added to my list of talents, if he’d been alive enough to do it.

Avalon was surprised again, and sad, I think, when I told her that Blake wasn’t going to follow on behind me. Avon wasn’t coming either, and nor was Tarrant, or Dayna or Soolin. She’d heard about Cally and Gan, apparently, and why they weren’t there with me, but not about the others.

I thought that was odd at the time. If you’d asked me back on the Liberator, or even on the Scorpio when things were a bit different, I’d have said Servalan wanted nothing more than to put our heads on spikes and then tell everyone to come and look at us. That’s what she did when Gan died – not … literally, though. I don’t think I could have handled that.

She used Gan’s death to show how badly Blake had screwed up. He hadn’t destroyed Control, and he’d left one of his own men behind. He wasn’t a hero; he was just a failure who got other people to die for him. Actually I said to Avon at the time that the official report read like he’d written it. Avon didn’t think that was very funny, which it wasn’t.

Even if Servalan herself wasn’t behind the raid on Blake’s Gauda Prime base, and Orac was fairly sure she _was_ , whoever had been could surely have made something out of the early parts of the evening. Mad rebels turn against each other. Kerr Avon realises freedom is a lie and guns down Roj Blake for his false promises. Blake turns bounty hunter – Avon shoots him before Blake can sell him out.

Perhaps they didn’t think anyone would believe it. _I_ wouldn’t have believed that we could have believed it either, except that I was there, and Tarrant _said_ he’d sold us, and I trusted Tarrant by then.

Then again, I’m not more gullible than other people, I’m less gullible than other people, and the Federation are pretty good at making people believe what they want them to believe, even non-gullible people. So it did surprise me they didn’t make a go of it.

“It should be obvious,” Orac said when I asked him about it later, “that the plan is to _gradually_ discredit both Blake and Avon now they are no longer around to disprove any statements made. The Federation will almost certainly orchestrate a number of further failures and atrocities, as they did before Blake’s exile to Cygnus Alpha, and then attribute these acts to Blake. His death, at the hands of the Federation, would only serve to make him a martyr, something the Federation is still anxious to prevent. The same is true of Avon, and of everyone else who perished on Gauda Prime.”

“Well, it’s a bit late to think of that now, isn’t it? Blake’s dead,” I said, never one to be slow on the uptake. “They all are.”

“It makes no difference whether he is or not, as long as this information is not published,” Orac said in a particularly patronising tone of voice.

“So let’s publish it then, you stupid box. What are we waiting for?” I said and after a long and very boring argument that I’ll spare you from having to listen to, that is exactly what we did.

Every computer Orac was connected to, every single computer across the galaxy, lit up all at once with the news that Roj Blake was dead, Kerr Avon was dead, Del Tarrant, Dayna Mellanby and Soolin Janss were also dead in the same shoot out. Then it also listed the names of all of those under Blake’s command, all of them, even down to the boy who ran messages for Blake from one end of the GP base to the other. All dead. All murdered by the Federation, except for Blake.

Avalon and I discussed it (we were getting on _pretty well_ by this time, I don’t mind telling you) and decided we would tell the truth about that one. Anything else would look like a cover up, if it got out later, but we made sure the report included a line from an eyewitness – “It was a mistake. Any idiot could see it was a mistake, and one Avon only made because he’d been betrayed so many times by the Federation before that and he thought Blake was the same, but he wasn’t.” The same eyewitness also described the Federation mercilessly mowing down Tarrant and Dayna and Soolin and the boy who ran messages and finally Avon, standing over Blake’s body to protect him.

Orac had footage from the base, and we published that as well. We blamed the whole thing on the supposedly dead ex-President Servalan, alias Sleer.

I was still on Avalon’s base when all this happened, but even where we were we could feel the shockwaves rippling across the alpha quadrant. Orac (useful little devil) picked up broadcasts from places as far flung as Lindor, Ullo Beta, and Luminar VII. Half the galaxy seemed to be in mourning, while the other half were readying themselves to fight. If Avon had been alive he would have said it was rather too late for that now, but it wasn’t. Blake and Dayna would have appreciated the fact that, really, the rebellion was only just beginning.

Interestingly, the people had even managed to find themselves a new hero to lead this new rebellion. It wasn’t planned, or perhaps Orac planned it without telling me, I don’t know. People need someone to believe in, I suppose, and with Blake dead, and Avon dead, there was a vacancy. I’d have thought Avalon, or Bek, or someone would do it, someone who had ever showed talent for being a leader and fighting, rather than running away, but it wasn’t either of them who captured the public’s imagination.   

The thing is - I was there in the surveillance footage, punching that Federation spy and then apologising, but my name wasn’t on the list of the dead. Well, it wouldn’t be, would it? So people made their own conclusions.

The first I heard of it I was in a bar on Rigel and somebody asked me if I’d heard the news about Blake. I’d grown a beard by then, which suited me very well, actually, even if nobody else would admit it.

Naturally I said I hadn’t heard the news, and after asking me if I’d been living in a cave for the last year (not far from the truth, unfortunately) this guy told me the whole story. And story it most certainly was, as in – heavily fictionalised and only bearing limited relationship to anything that had actually happened.

Apparently after the Federation massacred Kerr Avon (who, having realised his mistake, was now standing over the body of his murdered friend), the delta thief Vila Restal had confronted Servalan’s troops single-handed. The Federation had destroyed this bit of the tapes because it made them look bad. That’s why we hadn’t seen it. After this act of daring, Vila Restal then destroyed Blake’s base in order to keep the work Blake had been doing secret, before fighting his way onto Servalan’s flag ship, taken control and flown past the GP blockade. He took out another twenty Federation ships as he did so with the ship’s laser canons.

I didn’t correct this fine gentleman, or even point out the flaws in his logic. Why would I? As a story, it was a good one. I bought him another drink.

Over the years I heard more and more stories about how I escaped GP, all of them more and more unlikely. Later, some of the stories people told about what I'd done _after_ that were even true. I’d discovered by then, you see, that I liked being a hero.

Funny old universe, isn’t it?

Avon said once that figureheads weren’t that difficult to come by – any idiot could be one. Turns out he was right, about both of us.

**Author's Note:**

> written for the prompt: presumed dead, Vila


End file.
